


1

by DetournementArc



Category: Original Work
Genre: Short
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-01
Updated: 2020-07-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:15:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 946
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25020766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DetournementArc/pseuds/DetournementArc
Summary: A short story about a revolution, and a graveyard, and a place where the human mind runs out.





	1

It was the latter days of the coup. A coup that followed months of rioting and famine, years of quieter more subtle brutalities before, upon decades and centuries of the inequities whose foul threads often color the tapestry of history. And what were the legions of military police in all their splendor against the elemental rage of a people who had looked upon the face of their own deaths in their sick and starved friends and family? Beyond a point, all the civic knowledge and statecraft cannot allay the beast that stirs below civilized human habit.

Those were but glimpses.

As the revolutionary army carried the crimson ribbon of the vanguard over the threshold of the gates of the Fort Dullahy military base, it was not long before the bodies began to be exhumed from the soft soil of the grounds and surrounding areas. Soldiers of the Old Nation, marked as deserters in official file. Body after body were found in a grim, unsteady succession. Bones, some smashed down into jagged gravel. Adults and children alike. Certain patches were found containing tatters of clothes and fresh blood, some kind of desperate attempt to disappear evidence. But evidence of what.

By the second week of the investigation, the revolution had ignited its contemporaries across the world. The bloviating old tyrants meekly rattled sabers before one by one, the capitols and statues came down. Things both in and beyond the camp seemed strange, the little absurdities of hastily abandoned shell companies and swiftly emptied bank accounts traced back one after another to a thousand Fort Dullahies, a thousand strange graves.

We had found an abandoned hall of masonry, weathered bricks totally swallowed by the earth. It was lined with bodies. Their uniforms appeared to be at least half a century old. We continued down that morbid catacomb, with naught but our flashlights to show our way down this seemingly impossible pile of dry bones and uniforms, until at last we reached the atrium at the very end, at the very bottom of the cold, pitch dark place.

And we did not need our flashlights.

A single rectangle of white light sat just off centre in the middle of the floor, as though a missing brick allowed the sunlight to flood in. Not from above, though, from below.

I reflect on it now. The hasty abandonment of the world the bankers, the despots, the politicians and partisans made. What loose ends could have been left, what other countless morbidities remain orphaned by their dreadful parentage. The thought didn't occur to me then, just the terror that clutched my bones as we neared it. As we looked in.

That flickering hole at the bottom of the world.

The lid came off of my mind, and we- everything- just came undone like a knot in a rolled up fabric that had been pulled loose. It wasn't a screaming silver sun, baleful and scalding cold in the bright-black sky below the world. That betrays the scale of the thing. The scale that made gravity disappear, that made space and time fall away like cobwebs around us. My comrades and I were at once made witness to the great, terrible shape of... whatever everything was.

To say the old gluttons of the world were custodian to a thrall of murmering corpse-gods that swam in wretched dreams below the world and behind the air and beneath time is to cover the TRUTH of it all like covering one's eyes with their hands to defend against the blinding light of the sun. Your skin is glowing pink and you may catch a glimpse, but you won't burn your eyes out. The old masters, in their foolish comfort and greed, let too much of that dreadful Truth leak out, and a people expected to be held docile under police and bread and circuses burned down the greatest militaries on Earth. We had taken in the full dose.

Whatever part of me that remains behind to write this is a scrap, the bare minimum of a mind needed to record these scant thoughts. Did I have a name? Did my friends? Did I love, did I really even hate? I'm an abstract concept wearing a suit of tattered flesh fit only to scrawl these thoughts in pen. I know not even if anyone will read this. Or if there is anyone.

The rest of me is, I think, continuing that righteous revolution down into the Heavens below. The time of humanity is over. As a species, we may have proven too fragile to suppress what the sheer horror awoke in us. We may become human again, in time, as we build the new world on the ashes of the old.

I'm at my wit's end now, the blood dribbling from this golem of bone and meat and old uniform that could crawl me over to this paper giving way to whatever tenuous excuse for "reality" remains to demand that No, Corpses Cannot Walk And Write, I Do Not Care What Else Is Going On, I Have Governance Over The Dead Yet And This Is Simply One Thing I Cannot Permit.

But I know this; the propaganda of the old world, that the masses were a barbaric lot who needed to be starved and kept afraid for the safety of their overpaid, wretched handlers, brushed ever softly on the truth. They were right to be afraid, for their naked evils have torn the skin from our species' bones, and there is not left but we despoilers of heaven, and the Saturnian magogs wandering below the Earth, who will die with their carotids and jugulars woven between our teeth.


End file.
